Conclusions
This research aims to establish the determinants of satisfaction with public transport services in order to develop an interpretative model of perceived quality. To this end, various statistical and econometric techniques have been applied to data from the satisfaction survey conducted in among users in 2013 by the Metropolitan Transport Consortium of Granada, Spain. The research has shown that quality of service is a multidimensional concept where technical and functional aspects of service provision have considerable importance. The analysis has also revealed the existence of a stable framework for significant variables that explain the perception of quality. Moreover, the findings of the interpretive model of public transport service quality of are primarily based on unobservable effects that affect each bus line and other observable variables that can be grouped into two categories: the Comfort Factor and the Services Supply Factor. The Comfort Factor constitutes the functional dimension and the Services Supply Factor provides the technical dimension for this model. The survey from which data was drawn to conduct the analysis shows that even though customers within the metropolitan area of Granada are satisfied with the service received (67.26%), satisfaction is not homogenous across all bus lines. This indicates that the users of different bus lines do not perceive quality the same way; an assumption on which the transport authority intuitively worked. Indeed, the perceived quality of some lines is above or below the average perceived quality. This differential behaviour may be due to different reasons, including the functional and technical performance of the operating companies, the commercial speed of the buses, the type of route and bus stop density, among others. Both operators and the public administration will therefore have to focus their attention on these lines in order to design measures to improve those with below standard compliance (Ongkittikul and Geerlings, 2006).
